by D. W. Buffa
The tight-lipped response of the chief of police not only emphasized, as if that were needed, the importance of the case; it also concentrated the public’s attention on the investigation, what the chief himself had called the ‘all-out effort to find the killer,’ and by doing that pushed all the other news to the side. The murder of Gloria Baker became, not just the dominant story of the day, but the only thing anyone could talk about. Because the police refused to release any details before they took the form of established facts, everyone was free to speculate, and everyone did. And not just about her murder, but about everything that had been going on in her life, as if the meaning of her death could be discovered in the way she had lived. An army of reporters camped out in front of the Hollywood Hills home of Driscoll Rose, hoping to be the first with the story of whether, as rumor had it, he and Gloria Baker had just been about to get back together again.
Driscoll Rose was not there. Devastated by what had happened, he had, according to his publicist, gone into seclusion at an undisclosed location. This was a serious disappointment to the reporters waiting to shout a question at him from the narrow winding street in front of his house. They packed up their cameras and went in pursuit of someone else sufficiently famous to have known Gloria Baker. Most of them joined the caravan parked outside the gates of the studio where they hoped to hear something further from Roger Stanton; but Stanton had issued the only statement he would make and, desperate to get away from the growing frenzy of a media gone mad, had slipped out of town to the private sanctuary of his Santa Barbara estate.
While the major television stations sent their trucks and their satellite dishes back and forth across Los Angeles, looking more and more like an army in retreat, a young newspaper reporter, just two years out of journalism school, tracked down the housekeeper who had found the body of Gloria Baker. Herbert Morgan was a night court reporter with an easy manner and a friendly smile. The cops, the ones who drove patrol cars in the more dangerous parts of Los Angeles, liked him. Part of it was the natural affinity of those who do the real work and instead of getting credit get told by those higher up the chain of command how they could be doing it better. But part of it was simply Morgan: intelligent, but eager to learn, and as certain as he was of anything that you were just the one to teach him. That was the reason he often rode with the cops at night, going where they went, getting a sense of what their lives were like. They liked him for that, and because they liked him told him things they would not have told anyone else. They told him about the housekeeper, told him her name and where she lived; and knew when they did it that they did not have to ask him to keep his sources confidential.
Yolanda Ross lived in an eighth floor condominium in a building across the street from the beach in Santa Monica. It was a place where you would expect to find young professionals with long and successful careers ahead of them and wealthy retirees from the upper Midwest who now spent their days watching the sun set from a bench in the ocean side park and every week or so sent postcards to their jealous friends from the movie capital of the world. It was not where a housekeeper was supposed to live. That was the first thing that crossed Herbert Morgan’s young mind as he parked his car and started toward the entrance. His second thought was that, why not – why wouldn’t Gloria Baker have paid her housekeeper enough to afford a place like this? She certainly had the money to do it, knocking down eight figures for each of the last few movies she made.
“Sure, why not?” he thought to himself as he trotted across the street. “What the hell! – Why not pay the cleaning lady a hundred grand a year.”
The thought of it, the easy money, the way it was thrown around, the wild unreality of how people lived out here, the comic relief of people who did not know that what they did was funny, gave a certain zany swagger to his step. With a silly, inexplicable grin on his clean shaven face, he rang the buzzer next to the name ‘Yolanda Ross’ and waited.
“Hello,” he said, trying to conceal the excitement in his voice. “My name is Herbert Morgan, and I’m a reporter with the -”
There was no response, nothing, and then, suddenly, in a plaintive whisper, ‘Oh, Christ!’ and then another long silence. But she had not shut it off; the intercom was still open, and that meant she was trying to decide what to do.
“I just want to talk to you – off the record, if you like. A lot of reporters are going to try to get your story. Talk to me, and that way you control it. Then no one will bother you again. If they know you’ve said everything you have to say, they’ll leave you alone. They’ll -”
The harsh, buzzing noise of the door unlocking cut him off.
Yolanda Ross was not her real name, and the story she often told about being the daughter – or the granddaughter, because dates tended to confuse her – of Cuban refugees was an obvious fiction from a woman who thought Cuba was somewhere around Mexico and seemed surprised when it was mentioned that Cuba was an island in the Caribbean. Herbert Morgan knew none of this when he rang the bell next to her door, but he had lived long enough in Los Angeles to know as soon as he saw her that he was in the presence of one of those women who wore as many different faces and played as many different parts as any actress seen on the screen. She had of course wanted – and probably still wanted – to get into the movies; they all did, every good looking girl with her high school dream, certain that all she had to do was come out here, get to Hollywood, and something would happen, someone would discover them and make them into the star they had always known they would be. In the meantime, they did what they had to do, got whatever work they could get, became whatever they thought they had to be. They made up names, named themselves, parents of their own ambitions, names that would set them apart, names that, heard just once, would not be forgotten; last names like ‘Moonsheen,’ a name so undeniably outrageous, so unbelievable, that anyone to whom they were introduced asked to have it repeated, afraid they had not heard it right, and even more afraid they had. Yolanda Ross rolled off the tongue like a romantic Spanish accent, the smooth sounding name of a gorgeous dark eyed woman you might expect to find in a night club somewhere in Caracas, which, as everyone knows, is just a few short blocks from Havana.
Tall and elegant, with glistening black hair and eyes that turned bright with her mood, Yolanda Ross led her visitor down a short hallway to the kitchen. A half empty coffee cup was on the table in front of the chair where she had been sitting. The morning paper lay open, a picture of Gloria Baker staring out from the middle of the front page. Yolanda Ross got the coffee pot and another cup. Morgan waited while she poured.
“You can’t use my name; you can’t say anything about me. You said ‘off the record,’” she reminded him.
She was older; somewhere in her early thirties, he guessed. Tiny crow’s feet had begun to leave their indelible traces at the outside corners of her large and expressive eyes. The skin at the base of her throat had a slightly mottled look. With a reporter’s eye for detail, Morgan noted the signs of age that after a while even makeup would not be able to cover; but he was young, and thought her one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He had also noticed the rich surroundings of where she lived: the expensive furniture, the stylish rugs, the handful of paintings, and the silk fabric on the chairs. He had been particularly struck by the photographs that lined the hallway. In several of them, Yolanda Ross was standing next to Gloria Baker. They were not photographs of a woman and her housekeeper. It was obvious from their laughing, carefree faces that they were very good friends. Morgan guessed that they were something more.
“You were lovers, weren’t you?” he asked point blank.
A sad smile shot across her broad full mouth, but it was not just at what she remembered; she liked Morgan, the soft innocence of his face, the quiet confidence of his voice.
“Off the record?”
“Yes, of course; whatever you decide.”
“We were; lovers, I mean,” she said in a rich, husky voice. “Not all the time; once in a
while. She preferred men, but there were times….She didn’t want anyone to know, and no one did; and I’m not sure why I’m telling you, except maybe I want someone to know how I felt, that I loved her, that I would have done anything….And then, that morning, when I found her like that….” She gave him an anguished look. “You won’t tell anyone? You’ll keep this between us? I’ll tell you everything I know, but you have to promise you’ll never use that.”
“You have my word. But the police are going to dig into everything. They’ll talk to everyone who ever knew her. They’re bound to hear something. They know you live here. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you couldn’t afford this on a housekeeper’s salary.”
She shook her head abruptly and then, holding it with both hands, stared into the coffee cup, thinking back on what had happened to her longtime friend and the strange convergence of their lives.
“We met at a party, one of those things where you don’t need to be invited; you just hear about it and go. Gloria had been in a couple of movies, small parts; she was anything but famous. We just sort of hit it off. I was taking acting classes, trying to get a start.” A quick smile slid sideways across her mouth. “No one knew who I was, either. We became friends, good friends; started going places together, talked about how whatever happened we’d always be friends. Then, not even a year later, her career took off, and before you know it – that’s how things work here – she was the one everyone wanted to know. But she didn’t forget about me. She hired me – not as her housekeeper; her personal assistant. The television people got it all wrong. I told the police that I came nearly every morning, which is true, but not to clean the house – there was a service that took care of that – to help Gloria with whatever she needed. What do you expect in this town! Everyone tells the story they want to hear. Housekeeper! What does everyone think: someone short and fat with three words of English.” Her eyes filled with irony, and a faint smile, the kind that conceals, and announces, a secret, danced for an instant on her lips. “Listen to me! I even made up my name. Gloria didn’t do that. That wasn’t one of the lies she told.”
His eyes still on her, Morgan flipped open his notebook and scribbled the words ‘lies she told.’
“What lies did she tell?”
She did not hear him, or if she did, paid no attention. She sipped on the coffee and then set the cup down on the table.
“What lies…?” he asked again.
“Everything: Who she was sleeping with, who she was in love with – who she wasn’t in love with.”
“Can you be a little more specific? Who she was in love with – you mean Driscoll Rose?”
Her eyes went cold. “That bastard? He’s a coward, and everyone is afraid of him. Do you know what he did to her? – No, never mind; I shouldn’t be talking about any of this. It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened, what happened to Gloria, the night she was killed, what I saw that morning when I….”
“Tell me about that; everything you can remember. What time did you get there?”
“Eight-thirty; maybe a few minutes later.”
“What was the first thing you noticed? Was the door open, was it locked, was it-”
“It wasn’t open; it was shut. It wasn’t locked, but it usually wasn’t when I got there.”
“Did you knock, did you -?”
“I never knocked. Well, that isn’t true. Sometimes, if I thought someone might be there – if someone had spent the night – I’d knock before letting myself in.”
Morgan was quick to see the significance. “But you didn’t knock that morning. You didn’t think anyone was going to be there with her, no one who had spent the night?”
“No, I didn’t think anyone was going to be there.” She said this with a certain hesitation, as if she had not been completely sure that she would find her alone. “I knew someone was coming over that night – the night before – but I didn’t think that….”
“Who? Who was coming over? Who was she expecting that night?”
“Driscoll – Driscoll Rose. They were talking about a picture they were going to make together, but it was all over between them. At least I think it was: you couldn’t always be sure about Gloria. We were good friends – I’ve already told you that – but she didn’t tell me everything. And she didn’t always know herself; and even when she did there was always the chance that she would change her mind. She did that a lot: change her mind about things.”
“Driscoll Rose – You’re sure he was there that night?” asked Morgan, holding the ball point pen just above the page.
“I’m sure she was expecting him; I’m not sure that he came.”
“But she was expecting him – correct?”
“Yes. She had me get the screenplay so she could go through it again.”
“What time was he supposed to be there?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me that. Sometime that evening; that’s all I know.”
“Was there anyone else – anyone else she expected – earlier, later?”
“If she did, she didn’t mention it.”
“All right; you got there at eight-thirty or so. You don’t knock, you open the door, and then…?”
“It seems stupid now, but I had my arms full of things, and as soon as I had it open, I turned halfway around to shut it with my shoulder. Then, as I turned back, I saw her lying on the floor – not all of her, just her legs, and I started to say something; you know, tease her about being on the floor that early in the morning, and then I saw her, all of her – the staring vacant look in her eyes – and I knew right away she was dead. And then I saw the blood, all over her stomach, the blood soaked into the carpet.”
“She was stabbed to death – she wasn’t shot?”
Yolanda Ross lowered her head and shut her eyes. Crossing her arms in front of her, she began to rock back and forth, a small, choking noise rising from her throat. Morgan did not know what to say.
“Stabbed I don’t know how many times, but over and over again,” she said, opening her eyes. “Her t-shirt was ripped to shreds and all changed color – changed color with her blood.”
“That’s what she was wearing: a t-shirt and…?”
“A t-shirt, and a pair of shorts and there was blood all over them.”
“What about the knife, the weapon? Was it there?”
“No, I didn’t see any knife. I heard one of the officers say something, that one of the knives in the kitchen – on the counter there was one of those wooden blocks knives are kept in – was missing. That’s all I know. I don’t know if they found it, or if it’s still missing…if the killer took it with him.”
Morgan made a few quick notes and then looked at what he had written.
“When you first saw her lying there like that, what else did you see? Did it look like there had been a struggle: anything knocked over, anything broken, tossed around…?”
“Some of the things on the coffee table were on the floor, and so was one of the cushions, a throw pillow from the sofa. And there were scratch marks on the wall. Whoever killed her must have dragged her across the room -”
“Maybe to grab the pillow, to shove it over her face to muffle her screams,” Morgan speculated. “Anything else – anything that was different?”
She thought for a moment. “The picture…there was something….No, I don’t know; I was in such a state of shock.”
“The picture?”
“On the wall above the sofa in the living room there was a life size portrait of Gloria. She loved it, thought it made her look more like a movie star than any of the photographs taken of her.”
Morgan had all he needed, and when his story appeared on the front page of the morning paper it was all anyone could talk about. Citing ‘reliable sources’ and ‘trustworthy first hand accounts’ he described what happened the night of Gloria Baker’s death with the kind of detail no other reporter had been able to provide and that the police had thus far refused to release or even to
confirm or deny. The actress had been stabbed to death with a knife taken from the kitchen, stabbed ‘multiple times’ after being dragged across the room –her fingernails had left scratch marks on the walls – as the killer forced her close to the sofa, where he grabbed a pillow to stop her screaming.
Morgan kept his promise to Yolanda Ross. He did not use her name or reveal anything about her relationship with Gloria Baker. Instead, he wrote that the next morning, when the housekeeper arrived a little after eight-thirty, the door was closed but, as it often was at that hour, unlocked. She found the actress dead on the living room floor, the t-shirt she was wearing in shreds and blood everywhere, all over her body and all over the carpet. The knife was nowhere to be found.
If these details helped satisfy the public’s curiosity about how Gloria Baker had died, the last paragraph in Morgan’s story started a firestorm of suspicion and speculation.
“The actor Driscoll Rose, with whom Gloria Baker had in the past been romantically involved and had once been engaged, was scheduled to meet with the actress that night in her Malibu home, the home where they had for a time lived together, to discuss a motion picture in which they were both going to star. It is not known if Rose ever actually got there. Attempts to contact him have been unsuccessful.”